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Apple has announced two new smartphones today – the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The two handsets are very similar, except the iPhone 6 has a 4.7in display, while the iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5in display. Here we'll mainly be talking about the iPhone 6, though much of this applies to both, but for more on the larger iPhone check out our iPhone 6 Plus coverage.
iPhone 6 release date and price
The most important question is when can you buy it? Well you won't have long to wait with the iPhone 6 going on sale from the 19th of September. From our brief look at the handset so far we can tell it will be very popular indeed, so you'll want to pre-order your iPhone 6, with pre-orders opening from the 12th of September. That date is for the US (and the UK almost certainly) plus 115 countries will get the phone by the end of 2014.
UK pricing SIM-free is £539 for the 16GB model, £619 for the 64GB and £699 for the 128GB version. That's, impressively, cheaper than the iPhone 5S, which launched at £549 for the 16GB version. Considering the bigger screen and extra tech, a price drop is a welcome thing.
iPhone 6 Specs
The 4.7in screen, up from 4.3in on the iPhone 5S, has 38% more pixels than its predecessor with a resolution of 1,334x750. That's short of the Full HD resolution might have expected, but it's still a very respectable 326PPI, the same pixel density as we saw on the iPhone 5S. Given that the iPhone 5S' screen was sharp enough, adding more resolution wouldn't have acheived anything.
The camera remains at 8-megapixels, it seems that Apple isn't convinced of the benefits of a higher-resolution sensor and we largely agree in principle. The big 1.5 micron pixels from the iPhone 5S make a return, so low-light photography should be good. The big addition is phase-detect autofocus, which should allow for far faster focus times.
Inside is a new Apple A8 processor which has 2bn transistors, that's twice as many as the old A7. Apple is claiming the new 20nm chip has 50% more graphics power than its predecessor, great news for gamers, plus it's also 25% faster as a CPU, so the new iOS8 operating system should run very smoothly indeed. Amazingly, it's also 50% more energy efficient – which should bode well for both battery life. Apple is claiming 10 hours of 3G or 4G browsing from the device, which sounds excellent.
The A8 includes a new image processor too, with hardware for faster face detection, better smile and blink detection when choosing the best shot from a burst. Video is also improved, with 1080p support at 60fps now and slow-motion video at up to 240fps.
Other new features include a barometer sensor, so the new iPhone knows your elevation and can make better fitness tracking calculations. An improved front-facing Facetime camera as well, with a new sensor and bigger aperture, for 81% more light than the previous model.
iPhone 6 Design
The new iPhone eschews the sharper edges of recent models and returns to a curved, metal outer shell, which is somewhat reminiscent of the HTC One line of handsets – especially with the inset strips at the top and bottom of the handset, which are needed so that the internal antennas can work properly. Again, the handset is available in the same three colours as the iPhone 5S: Gold, Silver or Space Grey.
The iPhone 6 is almost 1mm slimmer than its predecessor, at 6.9mm to 7.6mm. That makes it a seriously slender handset, slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy S5 at 8.1mm. It looks fantastic we think, and this slender appearance is down to Apple not boosting the battery size, but instead making the handset more efficient.
The handset still retains the circular Touch ID button at the bottom of the display, but the power button has now moved the side of the iPhone so that it's easier to reach given the new, larger handset.
